Page 82 - The Cambrian Evidence that Darwin Failed to Comprehend

The Cambrian Evidence That Darwin Failed to Comprehend

dents to work on the fossils. But he chose not to rock the boat of evo-
lution. Today fossil representatives of the Cambrian era have been
found in China, Africa, the British Isles, Sweden, Greenland. The ex-
plosion [in the Cambrian Period] was worldwide. But before it be-
came proper to discuss the extraordinary nature of the explosion, the
data were simply not reported. 46

Decades after Walcott’s death, the Burgess Shale fossils were re-
examined. Harry Blackmore Whittington, Derek Briggs and Simon
Conway-Morris, a team of scientists known as the Cambridge
Group, performed a detailed analysis of the fossils in the 1980s.
They concluded that the fauna were even more varied and extraor-
dinary than Walcott had stated, and reported that the fossils could
not be classified under any known categories. All these organisms
had emerged suddenly in the Cambrian Period, between 542 and
490 million years ago, in their exceedingly developed and complex
forms.
The results that emerged were so unexpected that scientists re-
ferred to their sudden appearance as an “explosion.” The Cambrian
explosion was one of the most remarkable phenomena in the histo-
ry of science, and for evolutionist scientists, one of the most inexpli-
cable. Even Darwin, aware of the Cambrian findings from his own
time, admitted that there would be doubts as to the validity of his
theory until this significant phenomenon could be accounted for. 47
Thus it was that the scientific world’s knowledge of the Burgess
Shale fossils was delayed. These very well preserved fossils were
like opening a window onto pre-Cambrian ecosystems of hundreds
of millions of years ago. Scientists therefore became ever more inter-
ested in what they might reveal. The unearthing of new Cambrian
fossil zones in the 1980s further increased scientific interest in the
Cambrian explosion. These new paleontological discoveries showed
that the scope of the Cambrian explosion was even greater than had

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